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Thursday, June 26, 2014

Project Playroom: Play Table with Storage

We've been making progress on our playroom. It is a project that is pure fun, for both of us. And the playroom is now at a point where baby grand #1 can go up and play to his heart's content. We still have our "closet playhouse" to do, but that will come along in due time.

The room is large enough to handle a nice, big play table to play cars, Lego's, or whatever else on. So, we headed over to Ikea, and bought nine pine Trofast shelving units. We planned on using five of them elsewhere, but we needed four for the play table. I like the pine Trofast shelving units because they are solid pine, and not a laminate, like the other finishes. These are solid units. You can sit (or stand... you never know with the kiddos) on them without a problem.

We got quite the system down and were able to make each of them pretty fast. We make a super good Ikea assembling team. I read the instructions and hand out the exact number of screws, etc, and Bob does the actual assembling. A match made in heaven.

After getting four of them all made up, we arranged them in an overlapping square, like it shows below. There are also bins that fit in the little shelving units (you can choose from three different sizes of bins). They are very affordable, so we bought a big stack of those to slide in the units and hold toys.

And check out what my daughter started doing with the Legos. There are still lots of bins that aren't divided up by color yet, but every time she goes in there, she makes a bee-line for the Legos and does a little separating. She may or may not have a penchant for organizing, which is A-OK with me!

To finish it off, my jack-of-all-trades husband made a metal top for it. It's the kind of a thing that will only get better with little scratches and scuffs in it. Since not everyone has a metal shop close at hand for this sort of thing, you could also make a wood top, and I've even seen some Lego platform tops. Since I wanted the surface to be usable for any type of play, I didn't want to have Lego platforms permanently attached. But I do have a bin of Lego building surfaces that are ready to use at any time.

And here it is in full swing. We have an old Little Tykes train and car set that our kids used to play with when they were wee ones, which is perfect for the little kiddos, but can be taken off and stowed any time they need more play surface.

And for the big kiddos, (adults) it is the perfect Lego building/playing surface. We had visitors a few weeks ago, and their son spent hours and hours in the playroom building all kinds of creations with Legos.